When it comes to all the elite conferences Silicon Valley is so well known for, Apple executives rarely make appearances. Apple’s shortlist includes the annual Code Conference and Allen & Co.’s business conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. The second kicks off next week.

Like last year, Tim Cook and Eddy Cue have been invited to hobnob with the tech and media world’s most powerful players. Both execs attended last year, and if they choose to do so again this year, there will undoubtedly be many interesting conversions had behind closed doors with competitors and potential partners.

The album is dead. So dead Amazon thinks customers won’t even care if all the songs in its new music-streaming service have been spun out of tune by DJs across the country for months.

To boost its digital offerings, Amazon is planning to launch its own music service, reports BuzzFeed, but rather than stocking up on the latest hit songs, Prime Music will shun new releases in favor of a potluck offering of songs and albums that are at least six months old.

Despite the fact that Steve Jobs didn’t want Apple to become a company in which people were constantly asking themselves “What Would Steve Do?” after his death, it was inevitable that people would compare Apple under Tim Cook to Apple under its legendary co-founder.

Asked about that topic during an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at yesterday’s Re/code Code Conference — and specifically whether there had been a “reset” period following Jobs’ death — Eddy Cue commented that:

Eddy Cue and Beats Jimmy Iovine sat in Walt’s famous red chairs to dish on the Beats acquisition

Now that Apple’s acquisition of Beats has finally been made official, Eddy Cue and Jimmy Iovine took the stage at the the inaugural Code Conference tonight to give a peak behind the scenes of deal, as well as glimpse at what’s to come in 2014 – including the best product pipeline the company has seen in 25 years.

The interview comes as Apple is preparing for its annual developer’s conference in San Francisco next week where it’s expected to announce new versions of iOS and OS X, and while will have to wait to see if any hardware will come out as well, Eddy Cue is already hard at work hyping Apple’s upcoming products.

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg led the conversation with Eddy Cue starting things off by parroting Tim Cook’s statements that Apple acquired Beats for three reasons: Talent, Headphones, and a Music Subscription Service, before revealing these eight new tidbits on the deal as well as the future of Apple:

Elusive Apple CEO Tim Cook will skip his annual sit-down interview with tech journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Instead, Apple is sending two of Cook’s top lieutenants to sit in the hot seat during the Code Conference this May.

Although the iTunes Festival has been a great success in the UK for years, it’s only at this year’s SXSW festival that it’s finally come to the States, with Apple arranging for artists such as Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and Kendrick Lamar to perform free for five nights in Austin, Texas.

What was the hold up? According to Apple’s Eddy Cue, they just weren’t sure they could reproduce the positive vibe anywhere else. But it looks like they’ve succeeded.

Calling it an “honor, a privielege and truly from my heart to Steve,” Apple VP and kahuna beach moondog Eddy Cue accepted a posthumous award on Steve Jobs’s behalf last night, as the Apple founder was inducted into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame. And Cue had a pretty cool anecdote to tell about Steve.

Apple packed a lot into one hour and 20 minutes today, with announcements about OS X Mavericks, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Mac Pro, and the stars of the show: iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. We think that this is about an hour and 18 minutes too long to watch, though, so we’ve condensed it to around 90 seconds.

Here is the Apple iPad Air and iPad mini keynote, right from Yerba Buena, in just 90 seconds:

The iTunes Festival, Apple’s 30-day music extravaganza, ended on September 30th with a performance by Katy Perry. Apple broadcasted live streams of all the festival’s shows on iTunes during the month of September, and the concert videos are still available to stream for a limited time.

Apple’s Eddy Cue recently gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly and talked about why artists (and Apple) love the iTunes Festival. He also explained how Apple is leveraging its connections in the music industry for iTunes Radio.

In a new profile of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Reuters spends time painting the two-year veteran of Cupertino’s top spot as deft, methodical, and tough. While he has earned a reputation as more of a delegator and less of a diva than Jobs was, the sources in the article say that he is still a focused CEO who expects results.

A person familiar with Tim Cook’s meeting style said “He could skewer you with a sentence. He would say something along the lines of ‘I don’t think that’s good enough’ and that would be the end of it and you would just want to crawl into a hole and die.”